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Virginia blogger outs state attorney general as a birther

While listening to the audio, one finds it difficult to discern the identity of the person asking the questions, or the venue where the questions are being asked, but the person answering the questions is almost certainly Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.

The anonymous questioner asks what can be done “about Obama and the birth certificate thing?” to which Cuccinelli responds, “It will get tested in my view when someone, when he signs a law, and someone is convicted of violating it and one of their defenses will be it is not a law because someone qualified to be President didn’t sign it.” He then claims that “as Attorney General,” he can challenge the birth certificate “only if there is a conflict where we are suing the federal government for a law they’ve passed.”

The questioner then asks how it can be proved Obama’s birth certificate is a fake.

“Well that’s a good question,” Cuccinelli says. “Not one I’ve thought a lot about because it hasn’t been part of my campaign. Someone is going to have to come forward with nailed down testimony that he was born in place B, wherever that is. You know, the speculation is Kenya. And that doesn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility.”

This is the same Ken Cuccinelli who recently came under fire for encouraging Virginia universities to rescind their anti-gay discrimination policies, a move that several groups have condemned as rooted in homophobia and bigotry.

I spoke to Tribbett, a former colleague, on the phone about the story. In order to protect his source he wouldn’t tell me where and when the audio takes place, or when he first learned of it; he would only say that it took place “at an event Ken was at.”

“I think it shows a shocking lack of judgment for an Attorney General to be having this kind of blunt conversation with a conspiracy theorist,” Tribbett said. “I think his lawsuit against the EPA, his letter on anti-discrimination policies and this audio shows that he is turning the Attorney General’s office into a circus freak show.”

Tribbett said the lack of details about the where and when of the audio wouldn’t make it harder to pin this on Cuccinelli, and that he reached out to the attorney general via email over the weekend with no response. He said that he’ll run any reaction from Cuccinelli if he offers one.

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